Bottles, jars and packaging

Bottles, Jars and Packaging for Laboratory Storage

Choosing the right bottle or jar means understanding what you're storing and how it behaves. A solvent that eats through polypropylene overnight won't touch borosilicate glass, while that same glass might shatter under thermal shock that plastic handles easily.

Most labs end up with a mixed inventory because no single material does everything well. Your choice between glass and plastic usually comes down to chemical aggression versus breakage risk.

Material Compatibility with Different Chemical Classes

Borosilicate glass bottles resist nearly all acids and organic solvents but cost more and require careful handling, especially when you're pulling them from autoclaves or ultra-low freezers. Type III soda lime glass works for aqueous solutions and buffers where thermal cycling isn't a concern.

Polypropylene and HDPE containers weigh less and survive drops, though strong oxidizers and aromatic hydrocarbons will degrade them over months of contact. PPCO bottles handle repeated autoclaving at 121°C better than standard PP, though you'll notice cloudiness after 50+ cycles.

PTFE bottles handle the nastiest stuff—hydrofluoric acid, hot concentrated sulfuric, chlorinated solvents that destroy everything else. Expensive but necessary when working with fluorinated compounds or trace metal analysis requiring ultra-pure storage of Chemicals that attack conventional materials.

Closure Systems and Contamination Prevention

• Screw caps with PTFE liners create vapor-tight seals for volatile solvents, preventing evaporation that throws off your concentrations over weeks
• GL45 threaded systems on media bottles accept vented caps for gas exchange during fermentation, connecting your storage directly to bioprocess equipment
• Tamper-evident caps show breakaway rings when opened, critical for chain-of-custody documentation in analytical labs
• Septum caps let you sample contents via syringe without opening the container, maintaining sterility for cell culture media

Polypropylene caps warp under autoclave heat unless you loosen them a quarter-turn beforehand. When building your laboratory Equipment inventory alongside standard Flasks and Laboratory glassware, consider closure compatibility across your entire Products catalog to avoid mismatched threads during critical experiments.

Volume Options and Space-Efficient Storage Solutions

Wide-mouth jars (60mm openings on 500ml to 2L sizes) work best when you're scooping solids or need to retrieve samples with spatulas—think agar powder, buffer salts, or tissue specimens. You can work without the frustration of narrow openings when measuring out 50g of reagent-grade salt.

Narrow-neck bottles give you pouring control for liquids and reduce evaporation during storage. The 28mm or 38mm necks pair well with dispensing pumps when you're going through liters of mobile phase or culture media weekly.

Amber glass blocks UV degradation for light-sensitive reagents like silver nitrate or vitamin solutions. You'll find these throughout any lab storing photolabile compounds under fluorescent lighting.

Pre-sterilized disposable bottles arrive gamma-irradiated and individually wrapped, eliminating preparation steps for cell culture work where contamination ruins week-long experiments.